


To Seek the Empty World

by madamepens (inkers)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Friendship, Eventual Romance, Explicit Language, F/M, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon, not changing much of the canon just typical of what has to change when adding a character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-08-19 14:13:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8211418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkers/pseuds/madamepens
Summary: Flashes of memories that haunt Levi in his sleep. Ghosts that keep on living despite himself. A woman standing barefoot in the stream, contemplating, perhaps, whether she’ll cross to the other side. And Levi, sharing moments the only way he knows how: in jagged pieces.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hhhhhh yes, I got sucked into the Attack on Titan void. But hey, this story has been a really good muse for me. Hope you all enjoy it!
> 
> Also, important note: I've only watched the anime, and while I know what's going on in the manga, this story is going to mostly follow the events of the anime (and then some). The whole first half of it takes place before Eren enters the Survey Corps (starting about 7 years before?,) anyways, so it's not too important how far ahead the manga is. Let's jump straight into it, shall we?

Captain Levi has lived this moment many times before now.

“W-where are the rest of them?”

“Is that—is she—she’s covered in blood…”

“Oh my god… Eduard…”

He doesn’t need to turn to know exactly what the other squads are gasping at, but he does anyways for his squad’s sake — or at least, what is now left of them. The thought leaves him feeling colder than he expects to feel. It always does.

In the dying twilight, the group of Survey Corps scouts gathered around the campsite watches a figure approach through the trees. The closer she gets the easier it is to make out all the colors and shapes, what’s there and what’s painfully missing, though not the expression on her face. Beneath her scouting cloak, her clothes are all stained dark, and instead of the standard two devices of her ODM gear, there’s six — the two harnessed to her hips as usual, and four hanging off of one side, rigged there by straps of leather that Levi is sure he knows from where they came. There’s a bundle of dark fabric in her arms that he can’t make out beneath the cloak.

As she draws towards the perimeter of the camp, it’s easier to make out the color of the blood that everyone already knows is there — her pants and shirt beneath all the leather straps were white before, but now are soaked in shades of red. Her face, too, is covered in it. The muttering around the camp fades into stunned quiet, muffled sobs, gear hitting the ground, as her frame enters the firelight and passes the first row of tents.

Levi can’t make out the look on her face until she’s passing him, but he was expecting that expression, too. Her eyes are glued to a fixed point somewhere in the lower half of her vision, and the rest of her features are eerily still.

She looks like a dead woman walking, and bitterly Levi thinks she probably wishes she were. The thought makes his stomach churn.

He watches her make her way to the other end of the camp from the way she came, her footsteps heavier than normal under the weight of all that she’s carrying, and she reaches Commander Erwin without a word. First she hands him the bundle of cloth in her arms, which Levi realizes are a couple of scouting cloaks that are too big for her. Then she undoes the amateur rigging at her hips and unloads the two extra sets of ODM gear at his feet.

When she straightens up again, she salutes the Commander with eyes still downcast, and tells him quietly, as though forcing her voice to sound, “This is all that’s left. I couldn’t leave it behind.”

Erwin seems to struggle for a moment to stay completely composed. Levi doesn’t blame him – the team he and Levi sent out had only been gone for a couple of hours at most. It takes the Commander a minute to decide on the best way to handle this.

“…Go wash up, soldier,” he says simply. “You’ll report when you return.” His way of showing sensitivity.

She’s expressionless still as she drops the salute and starts towards the stream they found when they arrived. Once she disappears into the treeline, a good number of the scouts begin the process of mourning.

Levi locks eyes with Erwin briefly, their silent communication never failing even in times like this, and Levi knows he has permission to disappear for a short while. After all, the losses today are mostly his. Erwin wasn’t close to these soldiers, so although the shock of their loss still hits him, he’ll be able to manage keeping face for the rest of the scouts easily enough without Levi’s help.

He decidedly leaves his gear in his tent as he moves to follow her to the stream. Their silent communication is even more implicit than his with the Commander’s – somehow it always has been, even on her first expedition with him – and he knows better than to leave her alone right now. Not that he expects her to do anything rash, he doesn’t even expect her to want to talk to him, but she and him are much the same when it comes to loss: if he’d had anyone to come after him like this the first few times he lost entire teams, it’s what he’d have wanted, despite what his cold reputation would have the scouts believe.

She’s kneeling in the water when he finds her, several dozens of meters down the stream away from the camp, splashing water over her face until tendrils of red begin disappearing into the flow of the water. Her cloak is off and now he can see the extent of the horror all over her.

The patterns of the blood spatters, the bits of flesh sticking to her arms and shirt and hair, the blisters on her arms, all tell stories he wishes he couldn’t read.

She starts on her hair then, wetting it completely before she runs her fingers through the dark strands to remove the viscous material. Her hard eyes are still fixed in front of her but her face somehow seems softer, despite the pink of her cheeks from where she’d been rubbing. “…The scout who fired the smoke signal,” she says quietly, “was dead when we arrived.”

Levi frowns. He didn’t expect her to say a word, let alone give him the report Erwin asked for. He kneels down by the stream beside her and has to turn his face away from the smell of her clothes.

“Only his legs were left,” she said even quieter. Her face is angry for a split second before she seems to realize that she doesn’t have the energy for it.

“Verena. There’s no need to say anything,” Levi tells her – he knows she knows, but he feels the need to reassure her, perhaps to warn her of what it’ll do to her. “The Commander will only have you relive it again.”

She shakes her head gently, and the water dripping from the long strands of her hair are no longer pink. “I need to tell you,” she says simply, emotionlessly. “I’d rather…”

He nods. She’d rather break down in front of him than Erwin, if it comes to that. As understanding as Erwin is, it’ll make everyone’s jobs easier for her to report to him the facts and the facts alone – not her survivor’s guilt, not her grief, not her anger.

The sun has set by now, but he can still make out her form in the growing darkness, see the light of the campfires in the distance in his periphery.

“There were ten of them,” she says then.

He represses the urge to cringe, to shudder. Ten titans. The team he sent to meet the smoke signal had only amounted to six bodies – four from his personal elite team, two newer scouts from another’s, with Verena leading them all in his absence. Six to six would have been overwhelming. Ten to six was…

“We couldn’t leave them be — they were too close to the perimeter, they would have followed us straight to camp,” she says. “We had to take them down.”

“None of you signaled for backup,” he says bluntly.

“I was the only one with a gun,” she replies. “I was knocked down as I was loading the shot and I have no idea where it ended up. But it was my fault for not checking with the team before we left. Of all the things to leave behind…”

She shakes her head minutely. It was all of their faults, Levi thinks, including his, but he can’t voice it.

“Kai was first,” she goes on, washing the filth from her arms. “He felled one, then took on the abnormal and miscalculated when it dodged him unexpectedly. We tried to lure the abnormal away, to break up the group of them at least a little, but it didn’t work for long. After we’d taken down two of them, Eduard slipped and grabbed their attention and two of them tore him to pieces right above me. I took down another on my own and when I looked back the two greenhorn scouts were gone. It was only Zita and me left, and four titans still standing.”

Levi isn’t sure he wants to hear the rest of this. Her hands have stilled in the water, her eyes moving quickly back and forth over the stream, as if watching everything replay itself right before her eyes. Their only light now is the early moonlight.

Her eyes still again, and then she begins taking the ODM gear and the harnesses off. “We tried to pick them off together by their speed, leading the fastest one far enough away that we had time to take it down before the others caught up,” she explains. “But it was an abnormal. I hadn’t realized. Zita launched herself at it and swung around its neck – but it caught her mid-swing, too fast for her to react. I launched myself at it but… I wasn’t… fast enough.”

He begins to feel her guilt gnawing at him – or maybe it’s his own. He keeps his face still, as composed as he always is, reminds himself repeatedly that this is the job. This has happened to him before. This is the job.

Verena looks down at herself, at the blood all over her clothing, and he’s nearly jolted by the movement.

“Even after what happened to Eduard,” she says, almost too quiet for him to hear, “this is mostly _her_ blood.”

Flashes of more blood, he’s seen this before, he’s been covered in his comrades’ blood before, he knows the feeling, the disgust, the horror – and he knows there’s nothing he can do for her. She knows it, and he knows that, too. But she’s struggling to stick to the facts.

“I continued with the strategy and led them away from each other, picked them off one by one. There were close calls, but it worked. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner,” she says, “have the team stay together and take them down one by one, _together_. I don’t know. …This is my fault, Levi.”

“Don’t blame yourself for being outnumbered,” he says. In his mind he pushes away the implications of her taking down four titans by herself – no, he’s definitely not thinking about how close she came to death.

“But we could have done it,” she says, and begins to strip, throwing her blood-stained clothes to the ground with much more force than necessary. He looks away, reaches under his cloak, and holds out a set of clean clothes for her that he’d grabbed on the way out of camp. “If I’d thought quickly enough, come up with the strategy—”

“You’re not a strategist,” he interrupts her. “That’s not your fault either. I sent Zita with you for that exact reason.”

“But if I’d been fast enough, at least, I could have saved them—”

His chest feels tight and he ignores it. “You’re the fastest and most efficient soldier in the corps second only to me. Your speed is not the problem—”

She snatches the clothes from his hand and stands to face him, her movements so quick that he’s almost startled.

“This is _my fault_ , Levi!” she shouts at him, enunciating every word. “Because I was _there_!”

His eyes are locked onto hers now despite the state of her undress. He has never seen her angry, not like this. She has never yelled at him before. The heat in her eyes, however, cools very quickly, and then her hair is hiding her face as she turns her back to him and finishes cleaning up.

This is the job, he thinks. You lose people, you watch them die, you cause them to die yourself whether you know it or not. It’s nothing new.

Except that it’s new every time. The pain resets itself with every squad Levi watches die, and the wounds are jostled every time he watches the same happen to those few close to him. Maybe it gets easier — you just can’t tell anymore once it happens enough — but it’s never the exact same feeling, never the exact same guilt, and Levi is only twenty-five but suddenly he feels very, very old.

He glances back over at Verena once she’s finished dressing and the dead-eyed stare is back, her hands working mindlessly to scrub her boots clean in the water. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders if she picked up that stare from him.

“Your guilt is valid, Verena,” he says finally. She hardly glances at him. “But I’m your Captain. I should have gone with you, instead of putting fucking maps together for tomorrow morning. All of you risked your lives in my absence — their deaths are on me.”

She picks up her gear and her cloak, then runs a hand over her face, letting it linger at her brow as she closes her eyes and stands. “Levi…” she sighs.

“No,” he says as he stands to join her. “It’s moronic to argue anymore about this. I’m walking you back to your tent and you’re going to sleep this off. Understood?”

“Sir,” she says simply. She lowers her hand from her face and turns too quickly for him to make out her expression again, but ultimately he isn’t worried. Verena is strong, and despite the horror of what she’s just been through, the two of them have seen more horrifying sights. She’s shaken, but that’s always temporary.

He only wishes comfort was possible. It’s the one thing they’ve never quite gotten down in the past three years.

Once they’re approaching the edge of the camp, she slows and turns back to him, meets his eyes briefly before she looks askance. “Will you be there?” she asks quietly. “When I give the Commander the report.”

He frowns at her for a moment, watching her face and her body language, then continues walking past her. “Let’s go,” he says, wondering where in the world she’d thought he was heading.

The second time hearing her recount what happened with the titans is easier, despite having to endure the first reactions from the other squad leaders in the main tent. Granted, he isn’t sure whether this fact is a good thing, whether he’s becoming accustomed to the horrors or repressing them or accepting them, but he’s just satisfied that Verena keeps her voice even and her emotions in check. Not that anyone would blame her otherwise.

Except, it seems, some do — not anyone terribly important, he notes, but all the same the tension in the air upon leaving the tent is too palpable. If she weren’t already caught up in self-blame, he thinks she would feel the tension as well, and he’s still surprised she doesn’t seem to notice all the stares and whispers surrounding her as she makes her way back to her small tent next to the rest of Levi’s squads’—

She does notice their empty tents still standing, though. He watches her stare at them for a long minute, his shoulders tense as he wonders whether she’ll cave, but then she turns and disappears into her tent without a second glance. It’s only once she’s out of sight that the whispering around the camp turns to murmuring.

It isn’t the murmuring of grief or mourning, but of suspicion, Levi can tell without needing to hear a single word of it. It’s in all of their faces, their stances, the way they’re all wary of him staring at them and trying to angle themselves away from his glaring eyes. So he’s glad when Erwin approaches him several minutes later because it means he doesn’t have to go looking for him himself.

“We have plenty of scouts keeping watch, Captain,” Erwin says, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with the shorter man. “You should get some rest, if you can.”

Levi ignores his attempts at sympathy. “They all think she left them to die to save her own hide,” he tells him instead, staring out at the squads of their expedition. “You can see it in their faces. She’s as good as a murderer.”

Erwin seems unfazed. “Her story will do its rounds,” he replies. “Eventually they’ll all hear her side. But many of them are mourning a sudden and unexpected loss that they didn’t see with their own eyes, and that didn’t produce any bodies to take home for burial. It’s a hard hit and they’ll grasp at anything that lessens the pain, even if it means directing it at an invented enemy.”

“Invented or not, we can’t make enemies of ourselves,” Levi retorts. “The real enemy is out there, threatening the entire fucking population let alone their friends.”

The Commander frowns at the language but sighs. “If I have to I’ll take the suspicious ones on a perimeter check myself — remind them who really killed our comrades,” he declares, his tone low. “Meanwhile, Levi — get some sleep. I need you ready at dawn.”

“Sir,” Levi affirms, but waits for Erwin to walk away before he turns and finds his tent, thanking his own foresight for positioning it right next to Verena’s.

He sleeps lightly until dawn, listening all the while for stirring from the tent next to his. There’s not a sound from her direction all night, and somehow this makes him even more restless in his slumber than usual. He has nightmares of finding her tent covered in blood and gore, of watching her disappear through the trees, and of her yelling at him in hatred, her body as bare as it had been by the stream that evening, but glistening and white and soft.


	2. Chapter 2

Levi wakes half an hour before dawn. After fulfilling his immediate habitual instincts to make use of the stream, his next instinct is to check on Verena. He frowns at his own poor manners but there’s no helping the fact that his mind won’t be sound until he sees she’s alright — so he pulls back the flap of her tent just enough to peer inside.

She’s still sleeping, the rise and fall of her back in the near-darkness enough to put him at ease.

He stands from his crouch and sighs. Of course she’s alright, he thinks, as if he expected anything less, but he also doubts that she slept soundly if his mild nightmares are anything to go off of. The rest of the scouts will be waking at dawn as they normally do, but he decides then not to wake her with the rest of them.

By the time he finishes getting ready and reporting to Erwin at dawn for the day’s agenda, there’s already far too much to get done. The missing supply wagons they made the entire expedition for are still, of course, missing, but if they aren’t found today the mission will have to be declared a failure. The gridded maps he spent all of yesterday making are put to use, then, as he combines the two remaining members of his special ops squad (minus Verena) with one of Erwin’s to take on searching the riskiest parts of the grid, that also happen to be the most likely possible locations of their missing wagons. Several other teams are put together to search the surrounding area, while the rest of the soldiers are put to work taking shifts out on the perimeter of the forest and the campsite, tending to the horses and taking stock of the materials they have left, and training the newer recruits when there’s nothing left to do.

All of this is organized within two hours after sunrise, and Levi is left reviewing the maps and filling out paperwork for the return home. He’s already decided that if the first teams come back empty-handed (by noon, he told them,) he would go out with a team himself, likely with Erwin and several other elites. He tries not to think about the fact that the majority of their most elite soldiers are now dead.

It’s as he’s signing off on the notices of their deaths meant to go to their families that Verena approaches his makeshift desk in full uniform.

“I apologize for missing the wake-up call, sir,” she says, hands held politely behind her back.

He looks up at her, face stoic, but feeling slightly incredulous. “You needed the rest,” he says simply.

It seems to dawn on her then that he’d let her sleep in on purpose. She frowns slightly and rests a hand on the gear at her right hip. “I’m perfectly capable of work this morning, Captain,” she says, then drops her gaze briefly. “…Though I understand if all you can assign me is menial work for now.”

He sighs and lays his pen down on top of the paperwork. “I have no doubt in your capabilities,” he replies, “but consider any menial work I have for you to be a favor, not a punishment.”

She shakes her head. “Everyone else has to go on as normal after… this,” she says, gesturing idly at nothing. “You most of all. I owe it to all of you to do the same.”

He represses a smirk – it would seem she’s already going on as normal, offering the unexpected sense of wisdom she always does in tough situations. “Regardless,” he responds, “the search teams have already been sent out. If they return empty-handed I suppose I can take you with me on the next rounds.”

She nods, he assumes satisfied with the offer, if not overly ready to get started on it already.

“Meanwhile you can take this—” he picks up an envelope from his crate-turned-desk and holds it out to her “—to the lookout southwest by the training group. I’ll have more for you to do when you return.”

Taking the envelope, she shoots him an odd look, but nonetheless moves around him to head towards the southern treeline.

He estimates half an hour before she’ll return, and once she’s out of sight he finds himself looking around the camp for anything dignified he could give her to do. There’s plenty of work, sure, or else he wouldn’t have bothered telling her he’d have something for her, but none that anyone from his special operations team would be normally assigned to do, let alone anything that didn’t involve handling the horses.

Truth be told, he didn’t anticipate that she would be so ready to go on as normal. Though now that he thinks about it, perhaps he should have known. If she’s anything like him after all — which she is at the basest of natures — he would have wanted to face the trauma of such an experience head on, to face off immediately against more titans or at least the threat of them. In their line of work such a response is really the only proper one, which is what he was getting at with Commander Erwin last night: the only solution to the horrors of their world is to identify the real threat and then eradicate it by any means necessary. The only way to prevent these things, these massacres, from happening is to weaken the horrors that cause them.

The best squad members Levi has ever been in charge of have been individuals who understood this basic concept and took it to heart, whose driving force behind all of their actions was to meet this ultimate goal. And so the best therapy he’s known for the trauma that comes with the job has been, essentially, to keep performing the job.

Even as he thinks it he realizes how cold the thought would sound to — well, anyone, really. But it has been a constant for him, and some part of him believes that the fact that Verena seems to operate in the same way has a lot to do with why they seem to understand each other so well.

It occurs to him then that he’s been staring rather intensely at some fixed point in the distance for the past ten minutes — a fixed point which happens to land near a young group of cadets grooming the horses. The cadets look terrified of him, and he represses another smirk as he returns to his paperwork. Perhaps he’ll have Verena go through some of the paperwork for him — the faster it’s done the faster he can move on to more important things.

She returns very suddenly ten minutes later, using her ODM gear to fling herself from the trees directly in front of Levi’s desk more gracefully than should be possible. For a split second he takes her efficiency for urgency and snaps his gaze up ready for an emergency, but it’s obvious rather quickly that no panic is needed.

She hands him a folded piece of paper from the scout she delivered the envelope to. After a quick once-over he tucks it away at the bottom of his work. He opens his mouth to facetiously offer her a cut of his administrative workload, but something about the hesitant way she’s standing before him tells him something’s bothering her.

“Did the lookout say anything?” he prods.

She shakes her head. “No, but…” She pauses until she assesses Levi’s interest in her problems — which, somehow, is an ever-present interest of his. “There was something I overheard the newer scouts talking about. About me.”

Ah, he thinks. He finds himself frowning, and leans back in his chair as he meets her eyes. “They’re suspicious of what happened yesterday.”

“Yes,” she confirms. “Or, rather, they specifically blame me for what happened.”

“I’ve already made Commander Erwin aware of the fact,” he says, and ignores her questioning look. “He thinks it’s a natural response to loss, or something, and that they’ll all get over it soon. Whether they just forget about it or not, the suspicions won’t last, I agree with him on that much. The brats just don’t know what it’s like. Or maybe they think it’s possible you’d abandon your team because it’s something they themselves would consider.”

“Everyone considers it, Captain,” she says. “But there’s a big difference between considering all of your options and acting on the worst ones.”

He nods. “That’s something you only learn with experience, sure,” he replies. “Which as I’ve said, is something most of these scouts don’t have. Don’t let their naivety get under your skin, Everhart.”

She crosses her arms across her chest and shakes her head. “They’re not wrong, Captain,” she mutters. “I didn’t abandon them but it’s still my fault they’re dead.”

“Verena—”

“Maybe both of us share the blame,” she says quickly, “but the fact still remains. You can’t tell me you don’t feel guilty for the people who’ve died under your leadership.”

He stands from his chair and moves around the desk to face her. The close proximity makes her drop her arms from her chest to make room for his space and, he thinks, for his overwhelming presence, though she’s not the least bit intimidated. “Of course I do,” he replies. “But there’s always someone out there you can trace the blame back to. Their trainers for not teaching them how not to die, their parents for not passing on the right values, the government for not sending us more men – whatever, but in the end none of that shit matters.”

She drops her gaze from his and he knows she’s taking in every word.

“In the end they’re dead, and we’re not, and we move on.”

Her eyes flash to his again.

“But you don’t move on,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here if I’d moved on. I keep fighting because they haunt me — and I know you do the same.”

He resists the urge to shake his head at the whole conversation. It’s far too early in the day to get this existential, and in his head he rejects the emotions that threaten to flood his system at the images this whole thing is conjuring up. The ease with which she sees through all his reasoning is altogether too intimate an ability of hers by now, and between the threatening sadness and the ever-present guilt she’s talking about and the intimacy he regrets physicalizing by standing so close to her, he ultimately decides this conversation is over.

 “We’re wasting time just talking about it,” he says. “If you’re apparently so concerned, there’s work to be done instead.”

She nearly flinches at his bluntness, but it doesn’t take her more than a few seconds to follow his reasoning in her head, and she nods wordlessly.

He does end up using her to help him get through all the paperwork which, he admits, would have been done earlier anyways had he started a few days sooner. They don’t speak as they work, the only sounds being the flipping of pages and the distant noises of the scouts moving about the camp.

The closer it gets to noon, though, the surer he is that the teams they sent out that morning failed to find the missing wagons, so he begins preparing them to head out. He and Erwin start hand-picking teams, sending Verena off to fetch the scouts they choose, and by the time she returns with the last of them and replenishes her supply of gas, the morning teams have returned to camp one after another.

Erwin and four scouts Levi can’t name are the first team to leave, and it seems the Commander followed through on his comment that he’d take the scouts that had whispered behind Verena’s back on a run to remind them who the real enemy is. He winks very subtly at Levi as they take off, and Levi has to resist the urge to roll his eyes at his Commander. The second team to leave is led by one of his remaining special ops scouts, who does so without a glance in his direction.

Levi and Verena leave last with three other scouts that Erwin recommended. Verena gives him a look as they take off side by side into the trees, and it’s a rare moment where he isn’t quite sure what she’s thinking. Then again he’s thoughtful enough right now as it is that it’s hard to concentrate on why she would keep glancing at him as they move through the forest.

He tries to focus on scanning the forest floor for the wagons, on keeping an eye out in the distance for smoke signals or titan activity, but he keeps finding himself glancing over at Verena almost as often as she does him.

It occurs to him how similar the formation the five of them are in is to the formation his squad would use on special ops missions, only there’s a body missing from the position behind him, and the three bodies on the fringes are completely wrong. He wonders if this has something to do with the look she gave him taking off. He’s not sure if it should be bothering him more than it is.

What he does know for sure is the way his mind keeps falling back on the nightmares he had last night: her figure disappearing into the trees, the blood in her tent.

He can feel the thought move suddenly from his unconscious into the forefront of his mind: the moment she appeared by herself through the trees yesterday evening, he knew immediately how close she had come to death.

And he is surprised to realize how much it scared him.


	3. Chapter 3

They find the wagons in less than three hours — or at least Erwin’s team does — in a sector of forest Levi had thought very unlikely, but when he goes over the maps again and compares them with the route the previous expedition was supposed to take, he realizes they must have had to go around a group of titans before running into the ones that ultimately made them lose the supplies. But of course everything only makes sense in hindsight. As it stands, they are two days behind schedule already and now it’s too late in the afternoon for the expedition to pack up, travel, and make it back behind the wall before sundown as they need to.

Not that he minds staying another night in the forest — despite how unclean he feels sleeping in a tent on the ground and with no access to a proper bath or shower, he isn’t too keen on the welcome they’ll receive back behind Wall Rose. They left on the expedition with sixty scouts in total, and lost eight scouts just on the way to the forest after the appearance of several abnormals and a failure on the part of one smoke signal. Losing six scouts just the night before with what happened to Verena, and assuming they would likely run into more complications on the way back (because that’s just how these things go in Levi’s experience,) they’re already looking at about a 30% death rate for what essentially amounts to a retrieval mission.

Erwin doesn’t tell Levi anything about the wagons when they all meet up back at the camp, and while he doesn’t expect him to, he’ll be more than a bit peeved if the supplies on those wagons don’t include some earth-shattering new piece of the titan puzzle that’ll make this entire excursion worth it. Otherwise, he won’t be able to meet the eyes of the mob sure to welcome them home, and he’s not certain how composed he’ll be able to keep himself when they beg to know if it was worth the lives they lost. It _better_ be worth it — that’s all he knows for sure.

That, and the fact that there are no bodies to burn or bury this time. Which doesn’t make it easier.

The corps “celebrates” that evening with all the rabbits and pheasants they’d caught throughout the trip, a treat considering how hard it is to come by meat behind the wall. The majority of them sit around the fire, minus only those scouts still on watch around the perimeter, and while the camaraderie is strong and there are quiet conversations all around it’s obvious every one of them feels the fourteen empty spaces around them. Levi sits by Verena as they eat but neither of them talk. The air feels too heavy.

Most of the scouts are near their tents by sundown. After a brief meeting with Erwin and the other squad leaders to go over the plans and formations for tomorrow, Levi retreats towards his tent as well, where he stops short at the sight of Verena’s empty one. He follows his gut instinct out to the stream, passing a few younger scouts on their way back from washing up that stop talking at the sight of his ever-present glare.

Verena is a bit further down from where he’d followed her the night prior, but this time she’s clean of all the filth, her long hair falling down her back in earthy brown tendrils and her stance more relaxed than he’s used to seeing on expeditions. She still has all of her gear on but her cloak is left behind and her boots lay in a pile on the rocks behind her as she stands barefoot in the cool stream.

She turns her head back towards him when she hears him approaching, but she doesn’t speak until he comes to stand at the edge of the water behind and to her left.

“Thank you for catching me earlier,” she says, cheeks hinting at an embarrassed blush.

He only nods, replaying the memory in his mind. The branch one of her hooks had latched onto broke mid-swing, and it was thanks to Levi’s quick thinking that she landed in his arms instead of flat against a giant tree trunk. She likely would have caught herself in enough time, he thinks, but at the time he didn’t want to rely on the possibility.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks to change the subject, gesturing to her feet.

She glances down, wiggles her toes in the water, and then looks back at him. “I probably will be soon,” she answers. “But it feels really good. You should try it.”

For a moment he thinks to scoff at her, before he remembers he hasn’t washed since that morning. He misses his shower at headquarters enough that the thought of having any part of his body washed in moving water sounds almost heavenly. So without a word he moves closer to where she’s standing, then sits at the edge of the water and starts removing his boots.

She watches him for only a second before she’s giggling behind her hand. “I didn’t actually think you’d take me up on that,” she laughs, before she wades back through the stream to sit next to him on the bank. “I daresay if anyone else sees you wiggling your toes in the water with me, you’ll never hear the end of it.”

If it weren’t for the rare sound of Verena laughing, he thinks he would be offended at her poking fun at him, but instead he shakes his head at her and sets his boots behind them next to hers, socks tucked neatly inside them. He rolls the legs of his pants up and moves his feet forward into the stream, relishing in the feel of the water carrying away all the dirt and grime. He sighs contentedly to himself, though he knows she hears him.

“Speaking of your reputation,” she says then, “I swear those scouts we had on our team have started looking at me the same way everyone looks at you. You know, silently terrified. As if now _I’m_ getting a reputation.”

“You’ve always had a reputation.”

“Not such an intimidating one,” she laughs.

But there’s something off in the sound he can’t quite place. He wonders if she’s put two and two together like he has, if she noticed the difference in the way the scouts had been looking at her compared to him despite the surface-level similarities. Then he hopes Erwin succeeded in staving off the suspicions that had been growing since yesterday.

They sit in a near comfortable silence for a while as the sun begins to set. It doesn’t take long for her smile to fade in that time, though she still moves her feet and toes idly in the stream.

“You know,” she says hesitantly, “I remember when you picked Zita for the squad, she told me one night she was sure you hated her guts. She wasn’t sure why you picked her at all.”

He takes a slightly deeper breath than normal, and leans back on his elbows in lieu of replying.

“I asked her why she thought that, and she said it was because of the way you’d always glare at her,” she continues, then gives a short, quiet laugh. “I had to tell her that was just the way your face looks. She didn’t really believe me until I told her to watch how you look at the rest of us.”

“…And to think, I chose her for her intelligence,” he jokes drily.

She giggles again, but when he glances over at her the small smile on her face seems strange. “I never had that problem with you, though,” she goes on after a moment. “The moment I met you, I just thought you looked calm. Composed. Tired. Even when you insulted me I didn’t feel like you meant it the way others might.”

“I didn’t insult you,” he retorts. The memory is fuzzy in his mind, he admits, but he’s fairly sure he’s never spoken ill of her.

“Of course _you_ think so,” she snorts, then lowers her voice to mock his. “You told me, ‘If Erwin can make your wit as quick as your titan-slaying, you may end up useful after all.’ Of course I didn’t take it like the other recruits would have, but still definitely an insult.”

He frowns. “I only meant—”

“I knew what you meant, Levi,” she laughs. Then she leans back with her elbows in the rocks to match him, her eyes level with his as the smile fades. “My point was, even though you don’t really treat me any differently from the other scouts in your squad, I’ve always felt comfortable around you. …I thanked you for catching me earlier but the truth is, as soon as I realized I was falling I knew you would catch me. Not that I would have just let myself fall, but I knew no matter what my plan was to save myself, you’d save me first.”

“…What does that have to do with feeling ‘comfortable’?” he asks, pointedly skirting around what he knows she’s trying to say. It’s more tactful, at least, than his first instinct, which was to correct her that he _definitely_ treats her differently than the other scouts, whether either of them likes it or not.

She watches him carefully, almost as if she sees right through his tactic. Likely she does. “I guess what I really mean to say…” She sighs, and breaks eye contact, watching the moving water instead. “Part of me is glad you weren’t there… with Zita, and Eduard, and Kai. Maybe if you had been, we could have all walked away but… you could have died, too, just as easily – or, at least easier than either of us would like to think. It all happened so fast…”

He knows this is the moment where he’s meant to say something, to comfort her, but the words don’t come. He knows there’s no point. And he knows she could have died just as easily as Zita did — or, at least, easier than he’d like to think about.

“I can’t imagine you dying, Levi,” she says after another moment passes. “I can’t imagine losing you.”

It’s in his nature to deflect, so he does. “That’s what you mean to say?” he asks, hoping she gets his horrible humor. “You’re comfortable with me because you can’t imagine me dying?”

She scoffs, and he can tell she’s resisting the urge to slap her captain upside the head. “You’re impossible,” she sighs. “I give up.” And she promptly moves her elbows out from under herself so that her upper body flops back into the rocks.

Levi stays where he is, his eyes moving over her torso, counting her breaths, before he gazes out at the treeline beyond the stream. He imagines himself facing off against the ten titans, watching his squad turn to corpses one by one before his eyes, unable to reach Verena in time to save her from the mouth of a fifteen-meter titan. Then he frowns, glances back at her frame lying next to him out of the corner of his eye, counts her breathing again. This isn’t a reaction he’s used to.

Nor is this a conversation he’s used to. “I can imagine you dying,” he says quietly, stoically. “Very easily.”

He hears her breath hitch.

“It’s so easy to screw it up,” he goes on. “A centimeter’s change in your trajectory is the difference between life and death sometimes. But what I can’t imagine is myself… after. How I’d be when you die. I have no idea.”

She rolls onto her side, lifts herself up on one arm.

He sighs, swallowing the words he can’t figure out how to articulate. “Just do me a favor, will you?”

She frowns. “What’s that?”

“…Don’t die.”

It takes her a minute for it to sink in, but then he’s putting his boots back on and rising to his feet. Before she can say a word, he offers her a hand, smirking slightly when she gazes up at him with her mouth slightly agape. After a second’s wondering, she quickly puts her boots back on as well, and lets him help her to her feet.

He lets go of her hand as soon as she’s standing, but the small smile on her face tells him she’s perfectly content.

There’s an uncanny peacefulness amidst the trees as they walk back to camp — he might believe it the calm before a storm if only the storms weren’t so frequent. He wonders idly when the constant threat became so comfortable as he lies down in his tent to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

Levi is well accustomed to nightmares. Over time they’ve gotten less and less significant, more just a part of daily life, and much in the same way he is used to restless nights, to insomnia, to the built-up frustration caused by too many nights of just not sleeping enough. He only counts himself lucky that he’s not physical or verbal in his sleep – at least as far as he’s aware – or else these close-quarters expeditions would be far more unpleasant than they already are.

Tonight, however, is the same nightmare over and over, seemingly playing on an endless, lucid loop. He knows it’s a dream of course, but he can’t force himself to wake from it. He keeps approaching the tent next to his, listening to the dead silence and the sound of his heartbeat, keeps reaching a hand out and pulling back the flap to see nothing but blood and gore and scraps of white clothing covering the inside as if red is the color their tents are meant to be. He keeps falling backwards in shock, listening for Verena’s breathing or looking for any sign of her but finding nothing, and then there’s darkness as if the moon had disappeared, and then the nightmare replays itself, one into another.

When he finally does wake up it’s because he’d shouted for her in the dream and the sound of his own voice is startling. He’s sitting up in his tent, forcing himself to breathe, and looking around at the claustrophobic walls to make sure the nightmare isn’t just replaying again. But this feels real, finally. The weight of the darkness on his eyelids is a misplaced comfort, one he knows well.

Yet as if by habit now he feels a pull from outside the tent. He runs a hand over his face and tells himself not to move, to just go back to sleep, but besides the fact that he doesn’t want to go back to the nightmares he also can’t help but feel that he needs to know. He has to check. If the strangeness of this nightmare is meant to be some warning sign from whatever gods above, he’ll kick himself for not heeding it, no matter what he does and doesn’t believe in. So with a quiet groan, he crawls forward and out of his tent.

The full moon is bright tonight, making up for the campfire that had fizzled out hours ago. It’s barely past midnight and every scout is asleep but him, it seems, not including the ones on watch within the forest. He turns slowly to his right and runs a hand through his hair – this is stupid, he thinks. Why am I so worried about a stupid nightmare?

But he’s anxious, too. He can’t deny that. It’s unusual for him to feel such fear over the well-being of one person – a person, he reminds himself, who is frightfully qualified to look out for herself without his coddling. But all the same…

He kneels in front of her tent with a sick sort of déjà vu, and reaches his hand out to grasp the flap in front. This is stupid, he thinks again. He pulls the flap aside.

⁂

 Verena has always been a restless sleeper, though from many others’ points of view she sleeps like a rock most of the time. Perhaps there are periods where she wakes up in the middle of the night for no reason at the same time every night, maybe sometimes she sleeps dreamlessly and can’t be woken by anything less than the sound of cannonfire, but for the most part she sleeps eight hours a night, full of nightmares, always waking up feeling as tired as she was going to bed. She’s only thankful that she’s mostly only ever woken up by her own accord – that, at least, has always been under her control.

Although perhaps that was only because of her tendency not to make friends, as that seems tonight to be the cause of her problem.

She wakes up to darkness and immediately knows something is off – either her instincts are going haywire, or her body is entering another of those rare periods where she just wakes up for no reason and can’t fall back asleep. For her own sake she hopes it’s the former. But then she realizes it’s neither of those things – there’s a noise she can’t quite make out, a rustling and – breathing?

Her own breathing picks up and she’s fully awake now, but she doesn’t open her eyes just yet. She can feel a presence nearby, perhaps not a malignant one but a presence all the same, and she isn’t sure how worried she should be.

But then – a touch at her ankle. It’s hesitant at first, what feels like fingertips, before they move around and she can feel a hand pressed flush against her skin right above the joint. It stays there, unmoving, and she can’t help how tense she is despite the fact that the touch feels so innocent. She flinches when it finally moves – just an inch downwards towards her foot as if drawing away – and when the movement stops she knows whoever it is is now aware she’s awake.

So she opens her eyes, and sits up.

It only takes a second for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight falling in from her open tent, and then she can make out Captain Levi’s face in the washed-out darkness. His expression is as still as ever but she thinks his eyes are slightly wider than normal, as if in surprise – and then she can make out the faint flush of his cheeks. He’s embarrassed.

“Levi?” she whispers, thinking this is likely an intimate enough situation that she can drop the honorific. His hand is frozen at her ankle. “Is everything okay?”

He doesn’t reply but continues to stare at her, and slowly his face falls into its normal composure before his eyes flit down to her blanket, to his hand on her leg, then back up to her face. She can tell he’s thinking hard about something, and the hand that isn’t touching her is clenched tightly on his thigh where he’s kneeling just outside her tent. He frowns, seemingly to himself, and the muscles of his hand twitch slightly at her ankle.

She pushes off from her elbows and sits up fully in the small tent, the blanket falling from her chest down into her lap. “Levi—” she whispers again, but he seems to have made a decision.

In less than a second he’s crowding her, and she falls back on her elbows startled as he crawls over her in the tiny space. When she realizes how close their faces are she lies back down fully to make room for him, though she’s not entirely sure why she’s allowing this. The flap of the tent falls closed behind him, but the tent fabric is translucent enough and her eyes adjusted enough that she can still make out his features in the dark. She feels his breath on her face. The faint blush hasn’t left his cheeks though his eyes are steady on hers.

He’s straddling her completely, a hand on either side of her head to prop himself up, yet he seems to be positioned in such a way as not to touch her more than necessary. Before she can think to question this entire situation, he’s speaking.

“It’s not appropriate for me to—” he starts, then seems to realize the implications of whatever he was about to say and takes several long moments to figure out how to string the words together properly.

She tries hard not to judge the situation before he can explain himself. The blush she feels rising on her cheeks, in any case, is unpreventable – she’s sure she’s had dreams like this before. Her blush worsens.

“I had… a feeling about something,” he says carefully. “I just wanted to check on you, but I didn’t mean to wake you. Once you were awake I had to explain myself, so…”

“…So you wanted to get out of the open,” she finishes for him as she realizes what his train of thought must have been, “because it’s not appropriate for us to be up whispering in the middle of the night.”

“Yes,” he says, but his frown is back. He must be realizing now how eccentric his solution to that problem was. His eyes flicker briefly down at her frame between his thighs.

“What did you mean you ‘had a feeling,’ though?” she asks tentatively. “You thought…?”

He stares at her for a second before he sighs, briefly shutting his eyes to pull himself together. “It was a nightmare,” he admits. “But it’s not the first time I’ve had it, since the other day. So I just needed to make sure.”

He’s uncomfortable and she knows it, but she has to know. Something about it all is telling her it’s important. “What happened in the nightmare?” she asks him.

She hears his fists clench in the blanket at either side of her head, and then relax. “…I would check your tent, and it’d be covered in blood,” he says simply. “But over and over again. Like I would wake up from the nightmare into another fucking nightmare. I thought… maybe it was my instincts trying to tell me something.”

“You…” she whispers, but the words don’t come. After what he said at the stream, she knows he must have been worried about her, but this… She doesn’t know why, but the thought of him having nightmares about her dying makes her heart clench painfully in her chest, and when she feels a knot forming in her throat she has to force herself not to follow that train of thought too far. In the back of her mind she wonders why she never thought he’d ever be that concerned about her until now, why she never realized how differently he treats her than the others. She feels like she missed a step on a staircase down.

“You were that worried about me,” she whispers finally. It doesn’t feel like enough but she thinks he understands.

He doesn’t reply to that, but his eyes are moving across her face, and he looks again as if he’s trying hard to make a decision about something. She’s sure he heard the waver in her voice and she wants so badly to know what exactly is going through his head right now.

“Levi—”

There’s a hand across her mouth. For a second she thinks he must have heard something outside, but the look on his face, the way his eyes are downcast now, instead tells her he just needs a minute. Or perhaps he has something to say. The anticipation is making her nervous, and her breathing is loud in the small space.

His hand is soft, his touch gentle for how firm the pressure is, and he smells like damp earth and tea leaves. She tries not to think too much about any of these things.

He moves his hand away from her mouth after a minute, resting it back by her ear, but this time it’s closer to her head and pressing down almost painfully on a lock of her hair. His eyes finally move back up to hers. The turn of her stomach makes her feel like she’s swimming.

She shifts underneath her blanket and then her leg is touching his through the fabric.

The feeling jolts him, and his fist clenches around the hair by her ear, pulling sharply.

“…I’m sorry for waking you,” he mutters, his mouth barely moving.

“It’s alright—”

“Just,” he says, “remember the favor you owe me.”

It takes her a second to remember what he’s talking about. _Don’t die_. The swimming feeling has moved to her chest.

And then he’s leaning back, one arm extending towards the flap of the tent to leave, and she doesn’t know what comes over her so suddenly but she grabs the front of his nightshirt and tugs. “Wait, Levi—”

His body freezes. All she can see is the outline of his profile, his hair falling forward into his eyes.

“It’s still bothering you,” she whispers. Her mouth has a mind of its own, and it has to be this feeling in her chest that’s making her sound so desperate to her own ears. “Nightmares like that – it bothers you that I came so close to dying. But why this time—why do you—”

Her reputation amongst the Survey Corps has always been for her speed, her efficiency, but it’s moments like this that remind her Levi is always the fastest. She only realizes he’s in her space again when his face is a hair’s breadth away, when she can feel his presence wash over her like a river. Somewhere in the back of her mind she thinks he’s trying to answer her unfinished questions by this, but the thought is cut short.

He kisses her.

His lips move slowly against hers and he tastes the way a revelation feels. Or maybe that’s just the revelation she’s currently having – that this is why, this is what their intimacy has grown into, this is the reason any of it matters. But the epiphany slows down with the movement of his mouth on hers, and with her eyes closed all she can focus on now is the way she can feel this all the way down to her toes.

The hand he’d reached towards the flap of the tent is gripping her shoulder, the other clenched by her right ear in the blanket beneath her. There’s no attempt any more to straddle her innocently; instead his knees are entrapping her thighs and his chest is as close to hers as he can get without breaking the kiss.

As passionate as he’s being – something she had never expected of him – he’s not pushing, not smothering, but giving her head space to move and her lips room to set their pace. She thinks he’s only not stopping because the hands she has gripped in his shirt are pulling him so fervently into her. She isn’t even sure where this is coming from but somehow it makes so much sense, like this is just another form of their nonverbal communication, like whatever it is that’s in their heads couldn’t be communicated any other way.

He’s pulling back then, and she follows his mouth for a split second before she lays her head back on her thin pillow. She feels his breath fanning across her face, and the night air is warmer than she remembers it being.

“I… I didn’t realize…” she whispers.

He shakes his head minutely. “Neither had I…” he says, but he doesn’t finish the thought.

She realizes she’s still gripping his shirt, and moves her hands to rest on his biceps.

After a hesitant moment, he dips his head to brush his nose across the tip of hers, gazing at her with his hooded eyes.

“As your Captain,” he says carefully, “I should advise you against this.”

Superior-subordinate relationships. The thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but now she’s trying to remember how bad the punishments can get for breaking such a rule. Some scout she can’t remember the name of had asked her about it once – she’d had a crush on Mike before she got herself killed. Levi’s nose brushes hers again, though, and she realizes he wants her to respond. “Is that what you’re doing?” she asks, her eyes roaming his face, punctuating her question by brushing her lips feather-like over his.

He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against hers. “I’m obligated to,” he mutters. “But as a man, regardless of my rank or yours…”

His lips drift closer again, and as they touch hers in a second kiss she thinks the feeling of revelation must have hit him too, that perhaps now that he knows the taste of it he can’t help but ask for more. They’re sensible enough not to get caught, she knows, but she’s sure if he hadn’t warned her he would have felt as if he were forcing her.

She grips his arms harder, kisses him deeper to make sure he knows what choice she’s making. And then he pulls away again, a little further this time, and meets her eyes.

“…We need our rest for tomorrow,” he says.

She’s surprised at how disappointed she feels. How long has it been since she’s kissed someone?

He straightens his back a little more so that her hands fall from his arms to her chest. “Don’t forget…” he starts to say.

“Yes.” She smiles lightly up at him in the darkness. “I owe you a favor.”

He nods, and though he doesn’t return the smile, there’s a look of calm on his features that she’s not used to seeing, behind the faint blush that still tints his cheeks. His hands brush her shoulders as he leans back and maneuvers himself out of her tent. With one more glance back at her, he lets the flap fall behind him, and she can hear his measured footsteps back to his own tent.

It takes her a while to fall asleep after he’s gone. Once she does, the sleep is graciously deep, and dreamless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the hiatus :( Been in a dry spell -- trying to get back into the swing of things!

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Emily Brontë's "Remembrance:"
> 
> _And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,_  
>  Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;  
> Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,  
> How could I seek the empty world again? 


End file.
